Site Maintenance and Stuff

Eric Patterson

Eric Patterson

Administrator
Staff member
I'm working with a consultant to fix some issues with the site and we will be doing an upgrade. The upgrade should only take a few hours. We haven't nailed a time down yet but I'll let you know when we do.

The other item we are working is the bot issue. Some may have noticed the site is sometimes sluggish. Large Language Model (LLM) bots have been slamming us recently. If you click the Members link you can see that the number of bots climbing the site at any one time is in the hundreds, if not more. These bots are scraping content to train their LLMs for things like Google AI, Chat GPT, etc., and many more we've never even heard of yet.

We are going to put the brakes on that activity. For starters they can abuse the site and its resources. Secondly they take content from here and provide it to their users. I'll be damned if the knowledge from this site is taken for free only for some AI tool to regurgitate it to a user, possibly for a fee, and not give us credit. It's bad enough the loss of activity we've seen from people turning to social media instead of forums, but now we have AI tools to contend with as well.

More to come...
 
Eric Patterson said:
I'm working with a consultant to fix some issues with the site and we will be doing an upgrade. The upgrade should only take a few hours. We haven't nailed a time down yet but I'll let you know when we do.

The other item we are working is the bot issue. Some may have noticed the site is sometimes sluggish. Large Language Model (LLM) bots have been slamming us recently. If you click the Members link you can see that the number of bots climbing the site at any one time is in the hundreds, if not more. These bots are scraping content to train their LLMs for things like Google AI, Chat GPT, etc., and many more we've never even heard of yet.

We are going to put the brakes on that activity. For starters they can abuse the site and its resources. Secondly they take content from here and provide it to their users. I'll be damned if the knowledge from this site is taken for free only for some AI tool to regurgitate it to a user, possibly for a fee, and not give us credit. It's bad enough the loss of activity we've seen from people turning to social media instead of forums, but now we have AI tools to contend with as well.

More to come...
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Thanks for all you do sir! It was apparent that this was happening when the synthetic tupelo deal came up in that thread and it already started generate an idea of what we have created. Gum wood.... I kind of like that, but its still kind of crazy AI has come up with its own idea of what it is. Specifically used for decoy carving it even said. Very interesting as its only been mentioned a handful of times on this forum only.
 
William

Amazing but I'm not surprised. Was there credit or a link back to the source? For a community like this where information is a major draw that brings in new members it isn't good when our information is served up to AI users and they never even hear about us. Mass use of these LLM tools is just getting going. If they steal and deny us the impacts will be quite detrimental.
 
Eric Patterson said:
William

Amazing but I'm not surprised. Was there credit or a link back to the source? For a community like this where information is a major draw that brings in new members it isn't good when our information is served up to AI users and they never even hear about us. Mass use of these LLM tools is just getting going. If they steal and deny us the impacts will be quite detrimental.
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Now that I think of it, I dont think there is any mention back to this site.

See nada… buts its picked up on our few posts about it
 

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Hey Eric,

Appreciate your efforts. I often visited the old Duckboats.net site. I also spent a lot of time on Workingdecoys.net. I had a bunch of pages bookmarked for future reference. Like Duckboats, it was a site rich with information. That site is gone now. I guess to was replaced with a FaceBook Groups page. I joined a FaceBook Group site call "foam duck decoys". it's the closest think I found to the old working decoys forum. There is good information on that FaceBook Group, but the majority of the posts seem to be decoys for sale. There are a lot of them. I really do not understand FaceBooks search algorithm ... it sucks. It is almost impossible too search the site. I'm now seeing a warning that posts older than 2 years old will be deleted.

I much prefer a forum to FaceBook Groups. Thanks for all your effort keeping the forum up and running.

Scott
 
Scott

Your experiences on FB mirror mine. FB doesn't want you to search and find information. They want conversations running non-stop even if the best answer or info was provided in the past by someone with more knowledge than the current crew. Its simply an inferior platform for the type of exchanges we do here. Yet the masses go there because there is so much activity and new content hourly. I like community and quality over "right now."
 
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